'Salem's Lot is one of my favorite novels. It had been a few years since I'd read it last, and I wasn't sure if it would live up to my memory. The novel has a fairly slow build-up, and I was starting to worry that it wasn't going to be as good on the second reading, but my fear was unfounded. 'Salem's Lot is an excellent novel. I really got to care about the characters, and was sad to lose some of them. The novel is really more suspenseful than gory, which really works well. I still consider this to be one of Stephen King's best novels. ( )

Excellent story, as is to be expected from Stephen King. One of his earlier works which I had not read before, this book is about a vampire who moves into a small town in Maine and the small group of towns people who recognize him for what he is. Of course the vampire, Barlow, had been around for centuries so he was not easy to catch and always seemed to be one step ahead of his hunters. The book starts slowly, introducing us to the characters and the eccentricities of Jerusalem's lot. The tension builds slowly as more and more of the town become exposed to Barlow and his unique charm. The ending leaves the possibility of a sequel wide open but as it has been nearly 40 years since first being published, it seems unlikely we will see one. ( )

I put it to the ultimate test by reading it imediately after Dracula. I must say it stands up very well against its progenitor. It also stands up well against Carrie, which I also reread recently. There he went for verisimilitude by the insertion of book extracts. Here he does it by showing in close detail the interactions within and between characters. The meeting of Susan and Ben for example. The interior monologue of the priest after the funeral is also wonderfully done and the text on pages 149 - 150 is nothing short of a beautiful prose poem. A powerful writer who is a lot more at home with his own voice than he was in the earlier work - not that it's perfect by any means. There are a few sentences/constructions that probably even make King cringe a bit.

I'm given to understand that there are references here to The Haunting of Hill House. I've not read that but there are certainly references to Dracula. His conception of the vampire is identical for example and he accepts Catholicism as an anti-vampire force. His treatment of sex differs a bit and reading this made me wonder what Stoker would have written if he hadn't been labouring under such strict censorship laws.

As so often, King is at his best when not directly describing scenes of supernatural horror - not that he does that badly. ( )

I was very disappointed with 'Salem's Lot. I feel like King ruined the book by giving too much away in the beginning with the information about a deserted town. Didn't know what was causing it at first but once that was established you knew how the rest of it would go down. Wasn't scared once. The overall story was alright, just wish there was more of a surprise. ( )

Wikipedia in English (1)

The town knew darkness...and the awful, heavy silence of terrifying images grotesquely dancing in and out of the shadows...and stark white faces, huge empty eyes and long gnarled hands that reached out with lustful insistence...and the paralyzing fear of a diabolical corruption and a hideoous peril more dreadful than death. But no one living in Salem's Lot dared talk about the high, sweet, evil laughter of a child...and the sucking sounds... (0-451-12545-2)

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.

Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster

Stephen King's second novel, Salem's Lot, is the story of a mundane town under siege from the forces of darkness. Considered one of the most terrifying vampire novels ever written, it cunningly probes the shadows of the human heart, and the insular evils of small-town America.… (more)